Special Agent In Cyberspace

State Police Expert Scans For Crime

January 04, 1999|By KELLI CAPLAN Daily Press

CHESAPEAKE — He's someone you will probably never meet - in person.

But watch out.

He's lurking online. Today, he might be posing as a 14-year-old girl in a chat room, waiting to be approached about pornography. Tomorrow, he might be surfing the Net, looking for scams. And the next day, he could be taking apart your neighbor's computer, looking for evidence of a crime.

His name? Well, he prefers to remain anonymous. After all, he says, there are too many people out there in cyberspace with the ability to ransack his credit history via computer. Or, with a few keystrokes, find out enough about him to do some real damage.

So who is he?

He's a 46-year-old special agent who heads the State Police's new High Technology Crimes Unit in Hampton Roads. Since September, his beat has been computers, and his weapons have been a mouse, a keyboard and a monitor.

State Police have started a unit in each of their seven division offices across the state. Locally, it's based in Chesapeake.

Each unit's purpose is to stem rising crime conducted behind technology's veil of secrecy. Often, that means providing area police the needed computer expertise to solve cases - a skill that some departments don't have.

The demand for the unit's services has been overwhelming, officials said.

"There is a huge need for it," said Dick Johnston, head of the National White Collar Crime Center in Richmond.

Computers are used not just for fraud and paper crimes, he said.

In fact, Johnston said, evidence relating to gangs, drugs, robberies and organized crime and murder is often kept on computers. They have become the file cabinets of the 1990s, both he and the special agent said. No longer is the issue finding the right file and opening it physically.

"The calls for my services increase week by week, day by day," the special agent said. "Word is spreading like wildfire about us. It's unbelievable. I have not stopped since September."

In that time, he was worked about 20 cases - many of them very complex - and he has seized about 30 computers. The backlog for his search warrants stands at about two weeks, he said.

Child porn. Online prostitution. Computer fraud. Computer hackers. Those are just some of the criminal areas that he's investigated - and will.

"The more computers there are, the more crime there will be," he said. "The Internet has changed everything, too. What a computer can be used for these days is only limited to one's imagination."

If computer crime sounds like something that happens to unsuspecting strangers, think again. "We are not immune in this area from these sort of things," he said.

Hampton detectives have taken full advantage of the unit.

According to a search-warrant affidavit filed in Hampton Circuit Court, a woman learned that $50,000 worth of computer equipment was ordered on her check card via the Internet. The special agent is working with Hampton police on the case.

Tom Dempsey is head of criminal-justice programs at Christopher Newport University. He said that computer crime had proven to be a problem nationwide and that police agencies had to arm themselves with knowledge to deal with it.

"It's very, very hard to investigate," he said. "The only way to combat it is through a specialized effort."

Extensive training has given the agent the cache of technological information that he needs to break cyber-crime. To do so, he has had to become an expert in computers and the Internet. He knows how to take the machines apart so as not to ruin evidence stored inside. And he is all too familiar with the places on the Net where illegal activities are likely to go down.

"There are areas out there on the Internet that are just wild," he said, guiding his mouse to click on another dark cyberspot. "There's good, and there's bad." The bad include everything from X-rated sites to the ones that feature details on how to make drugs and bombs.

For years, the agent worked as a criminal investigator for State Police, assigned for a time to York and James City counties. Combining his detective skills and his computer savvy, he said, made a custom fit as a high-tech investigator.

"It's been fascinating," he said. "State Police saw a need for this and went forward with it. We're way out in front of a lot of other agencies."

That's something that Capt. Larry Burchett, who oversees the special agents, is proud of. State Police have tried to be proactive, rather than reactive, regarding the unsavory side of the cyberworld. The development of the high-tech units was a way to get ahead of the growing swell of computer crime, he said. Before the widespread use of computers and the Internet, the agency was not prepared to deal with it.

"Basically, we saw a need," Burchett said. "We think it's a trend in law enforcement."

Accessing electronic files takes great skill, the agent said.

"If I were a bad guy and I wanted to hide something, there are many ways now to do that on a computer," he said.